SOURCE: "The Frontiers of Native American Women's Writing: Sarah Winnemucca's Life among the Piutes," in New Voices in Native American Literary Criticism, edited by Arnold Krupat, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993, pp. 222-52.

In the essay that follows, Georgi-Findlay examines the American frontier experience from the perspective of a Native American woman—Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins—using her Life among the Piutes to discuss the role of gender in such areas as assimilation, Native American/white relations, literary style, and sexual and political power.

The study of the history, literature, and popular mythology of American westward expansion and the frontier West has, during the past decades, undergone some crucial reconsideration, if not revision, through the inclusion of two new angles of vision: the focus on the tribal people dispossessed by the westward movement and, more recently, on the largely ignored and for a long time invisible participation of women in this...